One of the best sites on the Internet is also one of the most toxic. No, I'm not talking about Twitter, but Stack Overflow. In previous posts I've referenced my own issues with the Stack network, and a few years ago I cancelled my account entirely due to the toxicity of some of its members … Continue reading This made my day→

I've been following a site called Shady Characters, created by Keith Houston. In his own words, "Shady Char­ac­ters is all about the stor­ies be­hind dif­fer­ent marks of punc­tu­ation". Recently, Keith went into some detail about the history of Emoji, which I encourage you to check out. The brief his­tory of emoji is far more in­ter­est­ing … Continue reading A history of Emoji→

This is interesting. An anonymous message-sharing system for messages under 100MB, including full Unicode support. Hopefully the spammers won't abuse it like they did with my site ncane.com. Created by Jason Irwin, who writes: The content can be text of any reasonable length and the password can be of any reasonable length and include multiple … Continue reading 10 Centuries Locker→

This post is not long enough to be a fully-fleshed out post on my technical blog, so I'm putting it here. Understanding Optimizer Timeout and how Complex queries can be Affected in SQL Server by Joseph Pilov is a worthy read if you're at all interested in how query plans are built.

[Last edited 5 December 2018.] A few weeks ago I started limiting my time on Twitter significantly, although I reactivated my account a couple of weeks later and it was like I never left. One network I feel more strongly about is Facebook, a company I describe as evil without a hint of irony. I … Continue reading Wither social media?→

Apple is about to release iOS 12, probably in two weeks when they have their annual phone (and watch) refresh on 12 September 2018. I've been a registered Apple developer for a long time, paying my $99 every year, and waiting for the second or third beta to put on my phone. It's true, I … Continue reading Beta software and ghost updates→

Recently I reinstalled macOS, and discovered that the search feature was not working properly in Outlook 2016 for Mac. Using these instructions from Victor Sachs on this page, I was able to get it to work after Spotlight reindexed everything: sudo mdutil -i off / sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight* sudo rm -rf /.metadata_never_index restart the computer … Continue reading Repair search in Outlook 2016 for Mac→

By now you will have heard about ICOs and blockchain, and these buzzwords are making you wish you'd invested early in Bitcoin. I'm here to remind you that this post was written specifically to attract traffic through the use of the word "blockchain", with a few more words thrown in, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. If … Continue reading Blockchain and you→